1. Technical Field
The present invention relates in general to distributed data processing systems and in particular to distributed data processing systems with cluster-aware virtual input/output servers (VIOSes). Still more particularly, the present invention relates to a method, data processing system and computer program product that implements first field data capture in a VIOS cluster.
2. Description of the Related Art
Virtualized data processing system configuration, which provides the virtualization of processor, memory and Operating System (OS) resources are becoming more and more common in the computer (and particularly the computer server) industry. To a lesser extent, storage virtualization is also known and provided in limited environments. However, within the virtualization computing environment, storage virtualization and management is implemented as a separate virtualization model from server virtualization and management. Thus, different client logical partitions (LPARs) associated with different virtualized server systems may access the same storage access network (SAN) storage. However, the client LPARs on one server do not have any “knowledge” of whether the SAN disk that the client LPAR is trying to access is being used by some other client LPAR belonging to the same server or another server.
Thus, the increase in the utilization of virtualization technology also leads to an increase in the potential problems and issues involved with implementing new hardware/software stacks. Included in such problems are those conditions that can prevent system input/output (I/O) operations from progressing due to new bugs that exist or manifest themselves in either the new hardware/software stacks or in legacy hardware/software stacks (e.g., due to compatibility issues. When these error conditions (or incompatibility scenarios) arise, system administrators potentially can be required to manually capture information in order to provide sufficient first field data capture (FFDC) information to a companies support department. This manual capture of FFDC is a time consuming process and susceptible to user errors.